RED MOON (musick & other arts)

BERTOIA HARRY
UNFOLDING

Original Issue: 1993 P.S.F. (PSFC-32) Buy it here!!!


Margot-meter: 5 moons / 5

01 - #1025 Unfolding
02 - #1025 Sounds Beyond
03 - #1032 Here And Now
04 - #1032 Here And Now Part II

from Volcanic Tongue

Harry Bertoia was an inventor, designer and musical instrument builder who assembled a series of visually-appealing sound sculptures that sang in gorgeous, otherworldly codes. Bertoia made a whole series of records featuring the sounds of his inventions on his own Sonambient label and this fantastic archival release from PSF makes a clutch of the recordings available once more. You could spend days inside this disc and anyone who ever enjoyed the slow nocturnal drones of Alan Lamb’s wire music, Dreyblatt’s strings or even Takehisa Kosugi’s drone work will have an idea of the essentially phantom nature of the topography. Highly recommended.

from Weirdo Records

Furniture designer who invented a really gorgeous diamond shaped metal chair. It sold so well that he retired to a barn in the Pennsylvania countryside & spent the rest of his life making sound sculptures instead. 360 different tapes of the sculptures are reported to exist. During the mid & late 70s, Bertoia issued some of his favorite cuts from these tapes on a private record label. This cd collects two of those records. Awesome metallic dronescapes and washes made by a jolly gentleman with a pipe.

REVOLUTION MOON (groundbreaking musick)

OVAL

94 DISCONT

Original Issue: 1995 Mille Plateux (MP CD 13)

Reissue: 1996 Thrill Jockey (thrill 036) Buy it here!!!

Margot-meter: 5 moons / 5

1 Do While
2 Store Check
3 Line Extension
4 Cross Selling
5 Do While [Cmd]X

from Amazon:

94 Diskont arguably did for music what Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon did for art: contributed to artist evolution using the established traditions of the medium and smashing it all to pieces. In an era when most musicians reach decades back to rummage through the classics vaults for inspiration, 94 Diskont comes off as a refreshingly forward-thinking album that doesn't quite abandon the electronic music of yesteryear, but rather turns it on its head in previously unimaginable ways. Oval's method of making music involves manually marring compact discs (with paint, magic marker, nails...) and piecing the damaged sounds together so that the resultant outcome is a dizzying sonic stew of clicks, scratches, and fragmented melodies. His previous album, Systemisch, was a fine work of electronic minimalism, but on 94 Diskont those shards have coalesced into actual songs with increased depth and complexity.

What's so remarkable about 94 Diskont is that pure technical and theoretical innovation is here used to create something that's both intriguing and beautiful (as opposed to the pop culture-driven skipping frenzies of John Oswald). "Do While" is the album's centerpiece track: a thick, meditative piece that doesn't grow weary over its ambitious 24 minutes. Shimmering bells crackle over a hazy, four-note organ drone-the musical equivalent of sleepless exhaustion or swimming through tranquil water. Other standout tracks include the bottom-heavy, menacing "Commerce Server" and "Shop in Store," whose manic, stuttering wails bring to mind a warped superhero theme.

Uncompromising though it may be, 94 Diskont reveals itself to be more accessible with subsequent listens; the warm, gooey textures of "Do While" and "Cross Selling" effortlessly pull the listener in, and even the colder songs are stunningly provocative. If the album is difficult in its scope and methodology, it's also one that reveals no influences and takes many risks, augmented by a keen sense of melody and songcraft. If ever a case had to be made that an odd musical approach can be aesthetically enjoyable, or that an album can transform into something far greater than the sum of its parts, 94 Diskont may be all the proof you need.

Mike Newmark

CRAZY MOON (incredibly strange musick)

RAHN ECKART
PACHINKO IN YOUR HEAD (Non-Linear Music)

Original Issue: 1998 Celestial Harmonies (19004-2) Buy it!


Margot-meter: ??? moons / 5

1 Pachinko In Your Head

Recorded at Aladdin Pachinko Parlour, Shinjuku, Tokyo.
HATE it or LOVE it! but, in any case, PLAY IT LOUD!!! o)))

from Celestial Harmonies:

Pachinko in Your Head is the latest groundbreaking industrial avant garde recording produced and recorded in Tokyo by Eckart Rahn.

...

Having said that, it should come as no surprise, really, that Rahn introduces yet another pioneering recording, however, industrial in this case. Fascinated with the chaos theory (seemingly random events) which when encountered in very large numbers establish a new order of predictability if not beauty and symmetry. Everyone can relate to the sound of raindrops hitting a tin roof and in that sound a pattern - or rhythm - seems to emerge.

When you listen to this recording, you hear the natural sound of a multitude of steel balls working their way through a number of Pachinko machines. Pachinko is Japan's most popular pinball game. It is estimated that some 10 million Japanese play the game regularly in parlors, some of which contain several thousand machines. When there are 1000–2000 machines operating simultaneously, there could be somewhere near one million balls in circulation. Coupled with the multitude of electronic sounds emanating from these machines, their addition at times creates an almost continuous sound. La Monte Young tells the story of how he listened as a boy to the whirring of overhead telegraph lines in his boyhood home in rural Idaho and how somehow an imaginary rhythm seemed to emerge from the slight variations of the continuous sound. Many believe that this experience led to the musical form referred to as minimalism which is, after all, based on the idea of seemingly endless repetition of ever–changing miniature patterns.

In Pachinko In Your Head, an imaginary rhythm appears to be emerging from the chaos of interfering sounds, sometimes when concentrating, but occasionally only when not concentrating. This groundbreaking recording challenges all listeners to discern for themselves the presence of such rhythmic patterns and suggests that chaos also applies to art and time and music in their various unknown ways.